Wireless network operators provide many services to their subscribers including voice call, short messaging and data services. One of the very important challenges in wireless networks is to locate and track the location changes (determining prior and next locations) of subscribers. Nature of wireless signals makes it hard to determine the location of the subscribers periodically in different time intervals as these signals propagate as long as their strength allows. There are various ways to accurately locate these subscribers periodically like timing advance or assisted GPS (Global Positioning System) with the help of satellites. However both of these methods can be used for individual usage and causes extra signaling loads on the network.
While interested in queries related to location changes of human groups rather than individuals, it is not feasible to query network for a location where thousands of subscribers may be present. Using such active methods is not efficient to retrieve prior or next locations of huge group of subscribers.
To overcome this problem in analyzing location changes of a group of subscribers and determining where those subscribers came here from and where those subscribers went to, a solution which allows queries in the historical location data, which does not depend on active retrieval of subscriber locations on network and will not introduce signaling load is needed. With the implementation of such a solution in mobile networks, movement analysis for subscribers can be achieved effectively by passively monitoring all the radio resources for specific network activities.
The U.S. Pat. No. 8,224,348, an application in the state of the art, discloses collection and analysis of network transaction information which includes the mobile device's usage, location and movements coupled with data from non-wireless network sources. Said collection and analysis allow for the automation of analysis for the detection of anti-social behaviors.
The United States patent document no. US20130084847, another application in the state of the art, discloses method and system for detecting, monitoring and/or controlling one or more of mobile services for a mobile communication device (also referred to herein as a Controllable Mobile Device or CMD), and in particular, when the device is being used and the vehicle, operated by the user of the device, is moving. The present method and system determines whether the vehicle is being operated by a user that may also have access to a mobile communication device which, if used concurrently while the vehicle is in operation, may lead to unsafe operation of the vehicle. If the mobile services control system determines that a vehicle operator has potentially unsafe access to a mobile communication device, the mobile services control system may restrict operator access to one or more services that would otherwise be available to the operator via the mobile communication device.